


in dark rain

by aestrales



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Inspired by Poetry, M/M, Reggie Peters Has ADHD (Julie and The Phantoms), character study family angst family angst again and fluff in that order, luke is trans-coded if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 05:47:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29202321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aestrales/pseuds/aestrales
Summary: four oneshots for four characters, each inspired by a Carol Ann Duffy quote.
Relationships: Alex Mercer/Willie (Julie and The Phantoms)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	in dark rain

**Author's Note:**

> i went on a carol ann duffy binge read and somehow this came out of it. i don't know either!! enjoy

**“You want him to fall, don’t you? I guessed as much- he teeters, but succeeds.” ******

“Let’s see if she’s half as good without her little hologram band.”  
It’s unmistakeably Carrie’s voice, sotto voce and syrupy sweet, and Julie stutters. Her heart sinks in her chest against her will- _come on, Julie, don’t lose your nerve. She’s just trying to get under your skin, don’t let her win_ \- a voice inside her head that sounds a little like Flynn says to her.

“Shut it, Carrie.” And that actually is Flynn’s voice, at speaking volume and accompanied by a savage glare. Even Carrie can’t withstand that much raw Flynn wrath, and she backs off, tucking her hair behind her ear with a perfectly manicured hand.

Carrie tosses one last contemptuous look in the direction of the grand piano, but it doesn’t quite make it all the way to Julie.

One deep breath later and Julie’s hands are moving of their own accord, the muscle memory so perfectly attuned that she’d actually have to try harder to make a mistake. She’d cut the band’s practice short for the last few nights so that she could perfect this, one of her own songs from years ago, rearranged a little and a verse or two rewritten. She knows the boys will be outside waiting for her when class ends, even though she’d told them not to be in the room when she performed- “I’ll be nervous enough, you guys, and you’re not exactly undistracting”.

Her voice, too, rises by itself, lilting over words that lost their meaning somewhere around the thirtieth rehearsal so that she doesn’t have to think about it too hard while she sings. The rest of the world falls away- Mrs Harrison, scribbling notes on a clipboard, and Flynn, eyes bright with encouragement- Julie knows that if she looked over now she’d flash a huge smile and a thumbs up, and the knowledge sits somewhere in her ribcage, comfortable and warm.

And when it’s over, the applause rises to meet her. Flynn hollers and Julie grins at her. Carrie is reluctantly slow clapping, eyes dead and staring at the opposite wall. Mrs Harrison nods at her, removing Julie’s performance mark sheet from her clipboard and placing it face down on the pile with the other students’.

“You were AMAZING.”  
“You KILLED it.”  
“I fudged like half a bar, I’m totally getting marked down for that.”  
“No way, nobody even noticed.”

Just as she predicted, the boys are in the hallway, and they light up when they see her.  
“How did it go?”  
“Want me to go see what grade you got?”  
“I bet you rocked it.”

The next class, Julie, Flynn and Carrie all get their mark sheets back with As across the top. Carrie's lips press tightly together but she says nothing.

*

“I’m sorry.” Carrie, who must really be sorry because she’s stood in the rain without an umbrella which Julie hasn’t known her to do since she started curling her hair every morning at age 12, is just outside the door to the studio. “I’m really sorry, I’ve been petty and jealous and mean and I just want my friend back.”

Julie doesn’t have to turn around to know that Luke, Alex and Reggie are eavesdropping behind her, surprise written across their faces.

“Come inside.” Is all Julie says.

****__ ** **

******“The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?” ******** **

Emily couldn’t wrap her head around it. Every day he seemed to shrink in on himself a little further, move a little more out of her grasp. He’d been such an energetic little child, always smiling and running about the place, and all he seemed to do now was play his guitar in his room. She wanted her son back.

She couldn’t have been more clear. She would have had an easier time of it if it wasn’t for him. Or if he was different, had a different path in life that she could make sense of. She wished he hadn’t been born, and it stung like nothing else when she told him to do something else, anything else. He understood exactly what she meant.

He could be a performing monkey, he could put down his guitar and play the role of the son she actually wanted. If she wanted one at all.

It was for the best, he told himself as he ran away as fast as he possibly could. Nothing was stopping him anymore. He didn’t have to live with the knowledge that who he was wasn’t good enough, wasn’t ever going to be. He could take the risks he wanted to take and the only person who would face the fallout would be him.

The hardest part was pretending that any of that was true in front of Alex, Reggie and Bobby. It was like they were hunting for signs of weakness they could exploit, pounce on to convince him to go back home. And the thing that scared Luke the most was that it would have worked. It really wouldn’t have taken much for him to run right back up their driveway and beg for forgiveness.

Really, he knew he never would. He’d been back, looked through the windows from the safety of the trees. He’d get as far as that, and never go further, however much the aching sensation like a fist around his heart begged him to.

And then he lost the chance.

Crying his eyes out on the kitchen counter, literally invisible- even more so than he had been in life- to his parents, felt like a fitting humiliation for him now. There was nothing he could do, to comfort either himself or them, to change any part of it. If his heart hadn’t already been fractured in dozens of tiny ways, from every shouting match that left him hoarse to the very moment that he left their house, never once looking back in case it would tempt him to return, it certainly would have broken apart now.

******** ** **

**********“There must be someone out there who’s kind to boys. Even if they grew.”****** ** **

These days, he didn’t stick around long enough for their yelling to get to him. It became a Pavlovian response- they yelled, he left. Took his bass and walked to Bobby’s, probably, or Alex’s, their houses were closest. Or left his bass behind and walked for an hour or two by himself, along the beach or into the city.

He’d take some money from his dad’s wallet and buy food, or a CD. His dad never minded, they were never short of cash and he considered it a kind of tax for having to live with the two people who hated each other most in the world. Reggie got pretty good at guilt-tripping his parents after a while.

His teachers thought he was dumb. They were probably right. He was a slow reader, and he couldn’t stop fidgeting, and he only made it through his classes by sticking to Alex and Bobby like glue. They just explained everything to him in a way that he actually understood, and they didn’t get mad when they had to explain it a second time. His teachers told him to stop distracting them.

Luke just sat back and did nothing in classes. His parents already thought he was a lost cause, he would declare, why bother trying? He wrote music in class, passed lyrics around to the others for their approval. Or just made paper aeroplanes.

And maybe Reggie could have been lazy like Luke, added bad report cards to his arsenal of guilt-tripping against his parents. But he so badly wanted to do well. He cared about the books they were studying even when he couldn’t wrap his head around the ideas his teacher talked about. He liked getting things right, and he was really good at math if he just had enough time to reach the solutions. He was constantly behind in class, but his homework was always perfect.

It just seemed like the older he got, the less patient the world was with him. Not that it had been particularly patient to begin with, but it seemed like every day he was falling another step behind, until the whole world seemed to be ahead of him, leering back at him. And he wasn’t Luke, he wasn’t a misunderstood genius, he couldn’t tear a new path and laugh as the world fell behind him and his trailblazing ways.

He wasn’t Alex and Bobby, who seemed to do everything right. Even when they supposedly didn’t, Reggie knew it was unjust- when Alex came out and his parents lost it, he knew that it wasn’t Alex’s fault. Even Alex knew that. But Reggie’s problems were his own fault- he was too lazy, or too loud or too emotional, he was the reason his parents always fought, he was falling behind in classes and there was nobody to blame but himself.

He wasn’t self-assured like the others. They had some kind of centre, something that strengthened and sustained them. Reggie was hollow.

****__********____ _ _ ** ** ** ** _ _ ** **

**************“For I am in love with you, and this is what it is like, or what it is like in words.”********** ** **

Words were not really Alex’s strong suit. Or, more specifically, the act of putting words to his own feelings was not Alex’s strong suit. It had taken him several years to connect the dots and figure out that his aversion to crushing on girls had nothing to do with being a ‘late bloomer’ and everything to do with having ‘bloomed’ in the wrong direction.

Calling feelings by their real name was a practice reserved for films and dicey romance novels, Alex concluded, and allowed himself to walk the world with a collection of unlabelled emotions swilling around inside like a bottle of coke.

Said bottle apparently chose a moment some twenty-five years and four months after his death to explode. Almost as soon as he’d said them, he wanted to snatch the words right back out of the air and toss them out of Willie’s line of sight.

“I love you.”

It had made sense about five seconds earlier, when the breeze blew Willie’s hair into his face and he’d let Alex brush it out of the way, and then kissed him, and then giggled and taken his hand and looked down the path where lifers were strolling with a soft, wistful smile and his face illuminated by the bright sun. It had made perfect sense then. Nothing in the world, in life or in death, could have made more sense.

Now he didn’t know what he’d been thinking.

*

Luke’s voice replayed in his head as he lay, back to the sofa, legs tucked under the coffee table, not so much sat as sprawled on the floor.

“You have a crush on Willie!”

Not like that was news to Alex.

Where had he even disappeared to? Alex had wanted to say goodbye. Well, truthfully he didn’t want to have to say goodbye. If not for their promise to Julie, he could have spent hours talking to Willie, watching the way he smiled and gestured emphatically when he got excited, and how he tried really hard not to laugh when pop culture references went over Alex’s head, but his shoulders shook and gave him away.

Why was he so enamoured with him already? Every other thought in the course of his day seemed to be Willie, the feeling of his hand in Alex’s, his smile, the way he looked when he was waiting for Alex to speak, open and inviting and earnest and soft all at once and just completely perfect. He missed him almost all the time and it was starting to burn a hole in his heart, like a misplaced magnifying glass on a bright day.

*

“I love you too.” Willie’s voice, soft and amazed, brought Alex back down to earth. Willie leaned up and kissed him, hard, and as he moved slowly away he collapsed into giddy laughter. Alex suddenly became aware of his hands, one on Willie’s waist, the heel of his hand against the bare skin that Willie’s cropped shirt didn’t cover, the other pressed flat against his chest. He barely had time to register that before Willie was kissing him again, and whispering against his lips, “I love you so much.”

**Author's Note:**

> title from Practising Being Dead: 'your own ghost, you stand in dark rain and light aches out from the windows'  
> julie's quote- 'you want him to fall, don't you? I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds' from Talent  
> luke's quote- 'the decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?' from Before You Were Mine  
> reggie's quote- 'there must be someone out there who's kind to boys. even if they grew' from Boy  
> alex's quote- 'for i am in love with you and this is what it is like or what it is like in words' from Words, Wide Night
> 
> (bonus- since the last one is technically a willex oneshot i'll say that my willie poem would be Miles Away 'i want you and you are not here... even your name is a pale ghost'. and hey maybe some day i'll write another one of these)
> 
> come say hi on tumblr! @kirkisms


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